IYO: worst subversion misfeatures?

Question

hi everyone,

what are in your opinion the worst subversion (and subversion/cvs style tools) misfeatures and what feature you would expect/wish to use and are not there?

thanks :)

edit, i forgot to mention them, for me the major lacking features are: - cannot erase what have been done previously; monotonicity helps a lot the implementation but having to delete a password would mean dumping the repo, editing the file by hand, reloading the repo (it's not a specific svn fault, though) - metadata is here, but not really usable. i think it's not possible to interpolate custom properties, efficiently search using the tags, ... - the client is a bit too free; it's hard to enforce client behavioural costraintsby the administrators. - crypto authentication of peers (though, https or ssh tunneling help at networking level) - merge-style operations with a mandatory central repo seems neither fish nor flesh for me: either full centralization and strict control or full decentralization and support for offline ops convinces me more.

i have to clarify that i'm not particularly against svn, it has a lot of good points, but good points are not useful as starting point for future improvements ;)

Answer 1

What I don't like with subversion is that it requires .svn subdirectories in the working copy.

Answer 2

Calling the merge range start and range end FROM and TO, which always leads people to think it means merge changes FROM somewhere TO merge target, when it actually means merge changes that happened between FROM and TO and apply them to the working copy.

That, and making merges a pain in all sorts of other ways, too.

Answer 3

Biggest misfeature: Merging twice from one branch gets complicated. SVN should itself keep track of what versions have been merged so you don't have to keep track of them yourself.

Biggest nice to have feature: Retract a checkin.